I avoid watching the 24 hour news cycle reporting on events like this because I don't believe it is healthy to be repeatedly exposed to tragedy like this over and over again. I think it reinforces feelings of fear, insecurity, and anger. others have told me that they find it promotes a sense of community which is comforting and quickens healing. thoughts?_________________FormerlyGreen_Finn

well....i tend to have problems with the 24-hr news cycle in general, because it seems sometimes they feel such pressure to say something that they say anything, and then they often say something stupid. or they interview "experts" who have some ax to grind, or they do those horrible survivor interviews ("how did you feel, seeing your husband get his leg blown off just after finishing the marathon?" - how the hell do you think she feels?) but that may just be my impression; i don't know that anyone has any statistics or anything.

i guess, though, if the news stories focus on community stuff (like all the people who rushed to help) - well, that could be good. and at least you can hope they will be on top of any new developments (although they may also jump the gun).

I just simply stopped watching/reading the news altogether. My friends and coworkers end up bringing up current events rather quickly either on various online platforms or around the office and then I do a search from there, but more often than not if I find myself subjected to a news broadcast I end up feeling sick in one way or another usually as a direct result of the reporting methods.

Last year I was working for an international company and at least half of the people in my office were born in other countries and a small but fair portion were people born within 20 miles of work. The diversity made the place very cool most of the time but it was mind-blowingly surreal walking into the break room and finding the TV set to Fox News, the worst of the worst.

Events like the Boston Marathon Bombing make me think about the scary and awesome power writers have. I say this because I immediately saw connections to past works of fiction. First is Swordfish in regards to the use of ball bearings to increase the damage. Second is CSI for teaching us the effectiveness of Iraqi IED cascading style time delay for maximum casualties. Now I'm not saying "this movie" or "that show" caused anything, but I am saying that the ways in which writers hope to influence people and the actual result may be quite different._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

It doesn't even have to be related to terrorism. Using steel balls and nails has been common in all kinds of booby traps, improvised weapons, and even mainstream military arsenals. Canisters full of them were shot over enemy lines in the American Civil War, for example. Any documentary that covered weapons of WWII was apt to mention German S-mines or "bouncing betties." Anybody who watched significant amounts of the History Channel before it turned into Ice Road Pawn Stars would have known about this kind of thing.

Well I was speaking in a more general sense in terms of writer responsibility, not just this specific attack. My wife and roommate, for instance, only knew about the delay in bombings from CSI. Also depending on the property, an idea may become far more commonplace and widespread. Creativity is a scary weapon when wielded by those who seek to do harm._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

Darqcyde, you appear to have a recurring problem where you assume too much based on the very small sample of you, your wife, and a few people you know. This is useful stuff, but it would be good to assume first that your experience is not representative of everyone's._________________::crisis mode::

Joined: 09 Jul 2006Posts: 9718Location: I have to be somewhere? ::runs around frantically::

Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2013 9:24 pm Post subject:

stripeypants wrote:

Darqcyde, you appear to have a recurring problem where you assume too much based on the very small sample of you, your wife, and a few people you know. This is useful stuff, but it would be good to assume first that your experience is not representative of everyone's.

What a very polite and succinct way of putting that - which has been a common theme._________________Before God created Las he pondered on all the aspects a woman might have, he considered which ones would look good super-inflated and which ones to leave alone.
After much deliberation he gave her a giant comfort zone. - Michael

I used to be concerned with the types of ideas that crime shows put into their stories. Then I watched a few. If they show something that's plausible to the viewer it's either been done so often in reality that they aren't spreading new information, or have long standing counter measures towards preventing it, or it's simply B.S. that sounds plausible but more importantly makes for good drama.

Take hacking the Pentagon for example. Sounds like a plausible crime, hacking happens all the time, just ask NPR. The problem is that there is nothing connecting the Pentagon's internal network to the internet. Any information exchanged between the two is done through a living person that walks from a computer on one network to a computer on the other. A coordinated attack at the Pentagon via internet is about as effective as a group of teens trying to convince a general to give them a nuke because of peer pressure.